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Dec. 20, 2022 - Sean Hannity Show
36:07
Facebook Analyst - December 19th, Hour 3
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A topic that I know is important to you, Eric, and important to me is big tech.
We talked a little bit about Twitter, the role they played, but it's about more than just Twitter.
It's absolutely about more than just Twitter.
It's about American elections.
And I think it's about one of the fundamental tenets of what we talk about and investigate and expose at the Government Accountability Institute.
And that's the fact that contrary to what many people believe, big business and big government are not enemies, they're actually friends.
Absolutely.
And who is the biggest business in the Biden administration but big tech?
Now you starred in, and we both co-produced a documentary that you can see on Amazon called The Creepy Line.
And one of the things that this documentary came out in 2018 exposed was the idea that the role that Google could play in filtering what people could see and filtering what people couldn't see and the way that that might shape outcomes in elections.
And Dr. Robert Epstein, who was sort of a central scientist in that exposed that votes could be shifted up to 20%.
So we thought that was a big deal in 2018.
We never would have expected what we're now learning more and more every day that Twitter and other big tech companies did for the 2020 election.
That's exactly right.
Well, you know, we were outsiders looking inside at big tech.
Uh but we're fortunate because we have someone on the line who is actually an insider, Kara Frederick, she's the director of tech policy at the Heritage Foundation.
But before that, Kara was a Facebook intelligence analyst.
Tara, thanks so much for joining us on the Sean Hannity show.
Of course.
Well, so I've got to ask you, I've been dying to ask you.
What does a Facebook intelligence analyst do?
Uh a number of things.
So I worked in global security and uh it's called Global Security Intelligence and Investigations.
And what I did was I helped start and run the counterterrorism analysis program.
So we were effectively looking at foreign Islamic terrorism on the platform.
So if there were any sort of um, you know, propaganda, we called it sort of cheerleading for terrorists.
Our job was to identify these individuals and pitch them over to the content moderation team, the community operations team, and sort of act as that central focal point for the policy team as well to get all of the information about these terrorists, their networks, and uh effectively get them off the platform.
We called it making the platform hostile to these specific actors.
So noble purpose.
Um I did the same sort of thing in the intelligence community for the U.S. government, uh, went over to Facebook to sort of recreate all of that, um, those mechanisms, those muscle memories, and it appears that we did our job too well, and now they're using it for a little more sinister purposes.
Well, that's the interesting question I wanted to ask you.
I think most people would say what you just described, what you did with Facebook is essential.
We've got to make sure social media is not fostering terrorism or criminal activity.
But how do you draw the line?
What would you say is the problem?
Because clearly in the case of Twitter, uh, and I'm sure in the case of Facebook, they're no longer censoring just people because of their violent criminal intent.
They're doing it for political reasoning.
So how do you draw the line and how do you hold these big tech firms an account for what they're doing?
I think at least to for the government to communicate with these companies if it's confined to things like uh child sexual abuse material, CSAM, um, when you know you have predators on these platforms trying to exploit children, okay.
You can talk to the FBI about it.
You can get remove these predators, uh, frankly, from the the digital space and uh roll them up if you have to.
Arrest them.
However, when you start using what all of the the, like I said, those avenues that you've Created to police the speech of Americans that does not adhere to a First Amendment standard whatsoever, it doesn't even get close to one, then I think you run into problems.
So you have to keep it to things like foreign Islamic terrorism, you have to keep it to to CSAM, child sexual abuse material.
But once you start to get into the game of policing legitimate political perspectives and viewpoints, then you've lost the plot.
So if you could draw a bright line between that foreign terrorism and you know what they're doing when it comes to American speech, all the better.
I will say, Peter, though, at this point, I don't trust these companies to do that, given the the fact that the specter of the Trump Russia collusion hoax was the justification and sort of hanging over the heads of all of these um executives of these companies.
They use that, you know, foreign malign influence to start policing the speech of Americans to expunge users for jokes on the platform.
It's very, very dicey territory, and in the absence of that bright line, I'd say they have to get out of this business altogether.
Is that the tipping point?
Because I think nobody has a problem with the idea of hey, we're gonna use social media, we're gonna coordinate with national security and Department of Homeland Security to like make sure that America is protected from threats foreign and domestic.
But that's very different than, hey, here's a story that's possibly misinformation about COVID, or here's a story about Hunter Biden's laptop.
When did you see the line start to shift?
Yeah, I think that's when they they blended the national security justifications into this whole idea that you, you know, police COVID speech, et cetera.
So, like I said, when it came to uh when it came to Trump's election in 2016, there was a lot of self-flagellation, you know, within Facebook, within other social media companies, because the media painted this narrative of these companies handed the election to Trump.
And then when you layer on that Russia collusion, okay, all of a sudden you have that ding-ding-ding, foreign malign influence tag.
And so I think they they use that to sort of make inroads into the policing American speech, the domestic game, unfortunately.
So yeah, I I in terms of you know, blue letting it bleed over, I think you have to stop them at that point.
You have to say foreign uh influence campaigns, okay.
But when it comes to uh domestic Americans, even if they're unwittingly spreading this kind of thing, you have to let Americans talk.
We have free speech here for a reason.
It's almost like you guys built a weapon to try to protect the country from Islamic terrorism and other types of threats, like you said, uh child sexual imagery.
And then when people's cultural and political sensitivities were so dramatically offended because they're so monolithic within big tech, they're like, well, we do have this weapon.
And so we could use it for this.
Exactly.
And that's the story of tech, really, um, you know, in from time memorium, right?
So you have uh this saying that we sometimes say, if you build it, they will come, right?
Uh a play off of uh the Robert Redford field of dreams.
And what not, if you build these tools, they're gonna get used for nefarious purposes.
You might have all of the best intentions in the world, but it's sort of like the the chat GPT that everybody's talking about, this AI, this machine learning tool that can effectively use a computer to spit out language that sounds as if a human has created it.
You know, you're people are gonna use it for ill, even if you have the best of intentions.
This is what happened in these tech companies.
You know, you try to to get child predators off the platform, you try to prevent terrorists from recruiting on these platforms, and it's gonna bleed over, as you said, because of the ideological proclivities of a lot of people in charge.
And the FBI didn't help.
They ran an influence campaign themselves.
So we're talking to Kara Frederick, she's the director of tech policy at the Heritage Foundation and a former Facebook intelligence analyst.
You know, Kara, I want to get your take on the Twitter dump that we're seeing.
I went into this thinking, well, this is just Twitter massively censoring uh Twitter employees were making these these aggressive random decisions based on their political proclivities.
Now that I see what's been released, there was a big role here played by the FBI, and to a certain extent, I would argue the FBI was more responsible for the censorship in terms of driving it than actual Twitter employees themselves.
Is that your experience at Facebook?
Is that the way that you read this Twitter uh data dump?
Yeah, so lucky me, um, I was there when when Trump got elected, but I got out in 2017.
So I really missed the the whole big disinformation, misinformation push.
Um, and you know, thankfully, right, that I didn't have to sort of deal with that.
So I when we uh communicated with the government, we did so through specific mechanisms, and again, for I think ultimately noble purposes, we were looking specifically at foreign influence, and we were looking specifically, or my team wasn't, but we dealt with people who were looking at child sexual abuse material.
So that was my experience at Facebook.
It looks like, as we've talked about before, they've you know taken those tools, um, maybe not the exact internal tools because they build new ones every week, it seems.
Uh, they've taken specific ideas and and use transferred them to this whole um uh idea of policing the speech of Americans in terms of what uh you know the FBI is doing.
I was gobsnacked.
I mean, we at the Heritage Foundation, we wrote a paper in February of 2022, and we said be on the lookout for the increasing symbiosis between the government and big tech.
And big tech will often work hand in glove with the government to do its fitting.
And we knew that because of what Jen Saki had said from the White House podium in July of 2021.
You know, we're working with Facebook to single out accounts and post for censorship, and we knew these users had been jettisoned from the platform after she pointed them out.
So we knew that this was happening.
There were other data points along that line, but we didn't know the extent to which it was happening.
So that did surprise me, especially having worked, I would say, cleanly with some of these government agencies for for good purposes to see it perverted in this manner.
I am uh I'm I'm I'm very very upset, and I think it's something that every American should be as as upset as I am about.
I you think that's it, right?
I mean, so Peter Schweitzer wrote the book called Clinton Cash, which came out in 2015, and it exposed the interlap of relationships between people that donated to Clinton Foundation and the people got favors from uh the State Department when Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State.
And that was reported on by the New York Times, ABC News, Bloomberg, Washington Post, every mainstream media outlet.
And I think what happened is after Donald Trump got elected, those mainstream media outlets said, hmm, maybe we were part of the problem.
And guess who doesn't report on stuff that we do anymore?
Those guys.
So do you think that that's basically like Facebook and big tech said, hmm, maybe we were manipulated, maybe we were used by the Trump campaign.
We're gonna make sure that never happens again.
Oh, a hundred percent.
And you even had your Roth, the the former head of trust and safety from Twitter, he basically invoked, quote, lessons of 2016, when he was providing justification internally for the censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop story.
So this was something in everyone's minds.
It like I said, the specter of it sort of hovered throughout the place.
Um I was there on election night.
I was actually sitting at my desk uh when Trump got elected in the dead of the night.
Uh it was it was a long day.
And, you know, coming into Facebook the day after was it was like a funeral.
You know, the place was just people were so upset.
And then when you had the the whole narrative about Cambridge Analytica um come out basically saying that, you know, people were propagandized on Facebook on these platforms into voting for Trump.
Um, then they I think there was this cognition of never again.
We will never be, you know, catpaws of conservatives or republicans, especially given the way they think, where they're headquartered, etc.
So absolutely it was it was a massive factor, and you're all Roth even admitted it.
We're talking to Kara Frederick, she's the director of tech policy at the Heritage Foundation, the former Facebook intelligence analyst.
Couple more things we want to get to with her and we come back.
I'm Eric Eggers, he's Peter Schweitzer.
We are filling in for Sean Hannity.
You can give us a call at 1-800-941-7326.
That's 1-800-941 Sean.
If you'd like what you hear, you can find our podcast at the drill down.com.
Hey there.
I'm Mary Catherine Hamm.
And I'm Carol Markowitz.
We've been in political media for a long time.
Long enough to know that it's gotten, well, a little insane.
That's why we started normally a podcast for people who are over the hysteria and just want clarity.
We talk about the issues that actually matter to the country without panic, without yelling, and with a healthy dose of humor.
We don't take ourselves too seriously, but we do take the truth seriously.
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You're our kind of people.
Catch new episodes of Normally every Tuesday and Thursday.
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Hey there.
I'm Mary Catherine Hammond.
And I'm Carol Markowitz.
We've been in political media for a long time.
Long enough to know that it's gotten, well, a little insane.
That's why we started normally a podcast for people who are over the hysteria and just want clarity.
We talk about the issues that actually matter to the country without panic, without yelling, and with a healthy dose of humor.
We don't take ourselves too seriously, but we do take the truth seriously.
So if you're into common sense, sanity, and some occasional sass.
You're our kind of people.
Catch new episodes of Normally every Tuesday and Thursday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen.
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Peter Schweitzer and Eric Eggers, we're filling in for Sean on the Sean Hannity Radio Show.
We have as our guest, Kara Frederick, director of tech policy at the Heritage Foundation and a former Facebook intelligence analyst.
So Kara, you've done a great job in laying out what the problems are, how we have reached the point to where we are today in terms of this collusion between the federal law enforcement system and big tech companies.
How do we fix the problem?
Is this a problem for government reform?
Is this a problem changing big tech?
How do we fix this?
Yeah, so I definitely think that there's a number of political solutions that we can explore here.
And you know, first and foremost, I want to say that Elon Musk buying Twitter to the tune of 44 billion dollars, that's not a repeatable strategy, right?
This is a singular moment in time.
So if we think, oh yes, the free market adjudicated properly, we're good to go.
Uh sorry, guys, that's not the case.
There's I I would love for it to be the case, but you know, he is one in a million, or one in a billion, even more so.
So I think that um relying on, you know, our next white knight billionaire to come riding to save us, it's probably not gonna happen.
So what we need to do, and we again approved, I think at the Heritage Foundation prophetic in this regard in February of this year.
We basically said you have to prohibit the government use of tech companies to chill speech.
So if there's any sort of uh suppression of political candidates, things like that, then this has to be reported.
There has to be that radical transparency coming from the teeth, frankly, of the government in a very pointed way in a very judicious way.
You know, I'm not saying make the government, you know, big and powerful.
They're part of the reason why we're in this tickle anyway.
But at the same time, you have to understand that this cannot happen.
And you have to frankly punish the the this happening from the government leaning on these big tech companies.
This is something that uh Jim Jordan has talked about, introducing uh draft legislation to this end.
So I think it's a good thing if we frankly just ban the government use of tech companies to chill the speech of Americans.
Um, and then you require transparency, require transparency in content moderation practices and algorithmic impact and data use, um, have that national data privacy and protection framework to to let people get a taste of controlling their own data, uh, so we're not just beholden to these tech companies and and whoever they want to share it with, etc.
So that's a a broader problem, but you have to start by prohibiting government use of these tech companies to chill the speech of Americans, period.
Kara Frederick with the Heritage Foundation.
Thank you very much.
It's such an important topic.
We've talked for a long time about how I think we're still very new in terms of realizing how empowered we should be with our own data.
We've talked before about the fact that it took us a hundred plus years to figure out that, hey, maybe we shouldn't pour chemicals in rivers, right?
Uh cars existed for a while before we realized that maybe we need seat belts.
Um and I think we're still very new and very early in the how much is our data worth and who's it worth it to.
And I think companies like Facebook, Twitter, Google, they know the answer.
But I think if there's if there's a government solution, it's to be to empower Americans to take more ownership over their data.
I think you're exactly right.
We need to take charge of it ourselves.
Kara, thank you so much for joining us.
We appreciate all the great work you're doing up there at the Heritage Foundation.
Thanks for having me.
Have a great night.
Thank you, Kara.
That's Peter Schweitzer.
I'm Eric Eggers.
We are filling in for the Sean Handy Show.
If you'd like to join the conversation, give us a call at 1-800-941-7326.
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Hey, it's Peter Schweitzer and Eric Eggers.
We're filling in for Sean.
We hope you are preparing for a very merry Christmas and a happy Hanukkah at this holiday season.
We have some breaking news.
The Supreme Court uh is putting a hold on the Title 42 suspension.
Remember, Joe Biden wanted to get rid of Title 42 that allows us to return people who get across the border illegally because of the medical situation with the pandemic.
He was going to get rid of Title 42.
The Supreme Court is right now saying that they were going to put that on hold.
So it means they're going to have a decision, but this is a huge win for those states that were suing uh the Biden administration over this policy.
It just shows you the power of Sean Hannity's radio program.
We led the program in the three o'clock hour with the discussion about Title 42 being repealed and what it would mean for the immigration.
And within two hours, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts says, okay, Eric and Peter, you're right.
Yeah, this is called a causal relationship, right?
I was never good at statistics.
But no, but I think it's a big deal, and I think it underscores several different, like very challenging and dynamic elements to the border because it's on the one hand, there's a reason why the border stays open.
Yeah.
It's because you do have Chamber of Commerce type interest.
I mean, there are big businesses in the United States, and we always say big business and big government are business partners.
Right.
So if big business wanted the border to be closed, it would be more closed.
Right.
And uh why do they want it open?
Why because they want those workers, they want cheap labor and they want people in there buying some of the different goods, right?
And so now, of course, if you listen to uh Gus Majorchis two weeks ago, we were told that actually the border was closed.
Is the border safe now?
I was watching a news channel and they were talking about an invasion was happening.
And I got a little concerned.
Look.
Um the border, the border is secure.
The border, um, we are working to make the border more secure.
That has been a historic challenge.
Uh I have said to a number of legislators who expressed to me that um we need to address the challenge at the border before um They pass legislation, and I take issue with the math of holding the solution hostage until the problem is resolved.
Um there is work to be done.
Um when you safe and secure are two different words.
There are smugglers that operate um on the Mexican side of the border.
Um, and placing one's life in their hands is not safe.
Yeah, this is a remarkable statement by our Secretary for Homeland Security that the border is secure.
He had a predecessor during the Obama administration named Jay Johnson.
Uh he was asked what he would regard as a crisis at the border.
He said if we have more than a thousand people a day sneaking across the border, that's a crisis.
That was Obama's uh head of homeland security.
We now literally today have seven to eight times that amount every day, and my orca says, no problem, the border is secure.
I do like what Majorka said.
There's a difference between being safe and secure.
When my children are buckled up in the car, they are secure.
But when I'm driving, they're not necessarily safe.
You know, they're they yell, they scream, it's distracted driving.
It's all not great.
But no, um, I think that's but but that's an example of this double speak that we consistently hear on the border.
Listen to this montage of the level of flip-flops we hear from members of Congress on what exactly the reality is at our border.
People who enter the United States without our permission are illegal aliens, and illegal aliens should not be treated the same as people who entered the U.S. legally.
The president's decision to end DACA was heartless and it was brainless.
Hundreds, hundreds of thousands of families will be ripped apart.
And the argument there, Mr. President, is Americans don't want to do the work.
We just can't find American workers to do the work.
Mr. President, that is a crock in many instances.
It's just not true.
In my view, Trump's decision to end the DACA program for some eight hundred thousand young people is the cruelest and most ugly presidential act in the modern history of this country.
We've got to do several things, and I am you know adamantly against illegal immigrants.
People have to stop employing illegal immigrants.
My proposal will keep families together, and it will include a path to citizenship.
We simply cannot allow people to pour into the United States undetected, undocumented, unchecked, and circumventing the line of people who are waiting patiently, diligently and lawfully uh to become immigrants.
Real reform means establishing a responsible pathway to earn citizenship.
To show you how this flip-flop exists right now in the Biden administration, the reason they want to get rid of Title 42 is they said the pandemic is over, right?
We don't need this anymore.
What did they do just a few weeks ago?
They extended the moratorium on student loan payments that people have to make.
What authorization did they use?
Because we still have a pandemic.
So it's totally political.
They they use it and justify whatever action they want to take, and it has nothing to do with a pandemic, and that's the problem.
When did we get to the point in this country when basic border security?
Jay Johnson saying a thousand people a day over the border is too much.
We're now at seven to eight thousand.
When did we get to the point where this doesn't matter anymore to one particular political party, the Democrats, who you have to wonder what would it take for them actually in Washington, D.C. to pay attention to this issue.
And just to be clear about it, uh we're not necessarily anti-immigrant and anti-people that come to this country for a better way of life.
Right.
You and I, I think both know people that work on the front lines to help Afghan refugees, Ukrainian refugees, right?
And so I think I met a family with a Zambian refugee not too long ago.
So there's people here who have very real needs.
Yeah.
And you know, I'm aware of groups like Tennessee Resettlement Aid and the George Shin Foundation that contribute to that.
And so people are doing the work to try to care for people, care for the least of these.
And so that's why it matters, right?
Because you've already got people in the country that need things.
And so if you just open up the border, then those people literally go to the front of the line, and it negatively impacts these groups that were told by the Biden administration and the political left matter more than other people.
That's right.
That's right.
I mean, we we have a process, and so legal immigration is great.
My parents were immigrants from Europe.
They're That's a story that's replicated elsewhere.
But this notion that we're going to have a wide open border and all the problems that are associated with an open border, not just the fact that you have this flood of people coming into the country who are committing criminal acts in some instances are terrorists, but you have the added problem that they're suppressing wages.
We have high inflation in this country right now, seven to eight percent.
Wages should ideally be going up for working families, and they're not.
And one of the reasons is you have this labor pool that comes in.
And again, this goes back to something we were talking about with the COVID shutdowns about the what I call the keyboard commandos, the people that work in corporate offices, and they support policy positions that don't affect them and impact them.
So they didn't care if the schools got shut down because they could work from home and take care of their kids.
It's very similar here.
The people that get affected by illegal immigration adversely are people that have blue-collar jobs because unskilled workers come in and they can drive wages down.
Uh the person who works at a corporate office in their office, they love the immigrants coming in because you know what?
Now I can hire the illegals to do my yard service, and I can pay them half what I would pay the Americans uh to do the same work.
So they love it.
And again, the policies that they're advocating have terrible repercussions for other people in our country, and they don't seem to care because it's all about them.
I love number one New York Times best-selling author Peter Schweitzer positioning himself as the son of immigrants and the champion of blue-collar every man.
All true.
This is the man who, just to be clear, parks in short-term parking at the airport, regardless of how long his trip will be.
Hey, we all have our luxuries, right?
We all have our luxury decadence, thy name is Peter Schweitzer.
Yeah, it's, you know, this is, I think, one of the biggest problems that we have in the country today when it comes to the border and the other issues.
One of the things I hear the Republican Congress that's coming in that they want to do, which I think is a great idea.
They cannot get Democrats to go to the border to actually see the problem.
I mean, you can see it if you go on Twitter and elsewhere.
So they're actually saying we're going to convene congressional hearings in Texas on the border.
So that effectively will force these members of Congress, if they want to attend congressional hearings, to go to the border.
I think it's a genius idea.
And I think we ought to have a 2024 presidential debate at the border.
At the border.
You know what's wild about what you just said?
It's such a great point.
But we had a dang bullet train nonstop from DC to the border when during the Trump administration, we were putting these kids in cages, right?
We couldn't stop having people come by there.
We hit we didn't have a border crisis.
We had a congressional invasion of the border crisis when we had these kids and being separated from their families.
But you're absolutely right.
Now that the Biden administration is taken over, we we see less imagery from there.
We don't see AOC crying at the border anymore like she did.
I think she might even kneel down.
Uh we don't see that anymore, even though the crisis is now worse, and again, the victims are the people uh that are getting brought over by these criminal cartels uh that are being exploited and they're being put in a situation where they're not legally in the country, so that's going to limit some of their options.
It makes them very, very vulnerable.
It needs to be done in an orderly way.
Again, the fact that you have people making decisions, they don't bear the consequences of those decisions is a huge part of this problem.
And I think it's actually getting worse in this country.
If you look at the demographics, people look at members of Congress in the context of you know what their race is and what their creed is, and that's important, that's fine.
But look at actually what their jobs are.
We have fewer and fewer people that are businessmen, that you know, are skilled tradesmen like you know, plumbers and and and people like that that are running for Congress and serving.
Most of them are either former government officials or people that come from academia from a corporate environment.
And yet they're making decisions that impact the lives of ordinary Americans on issues like immigration.
They have no context and they don't seem to be particularly interested in even figuring out what the context of these problems are.
One of the things that we study at the Government Accountability Institute is incentives.
Yes.
And one of the things I think my favorite thing that we do is hey, if this seems like a problem, and it's always been a problem, and it seems like solutions are possible.
How come no one's interested in pursuing the solutions?
Right.
And the answer is because entrenched interests continue to make money off of the status quo.
Uh, And I think honestly, the political left happens to also benefit politically as well.
They do.
They do.
I mean, so many of these issues.
Sometimes people go and argue that that these issues are somehow a conspiracy.
That people that are, you know, wear funny robes that have secret handshakes that are part of secret society.
That's not it.
This is this is all about the industrial logic of big government.
Yeah, they're not uh it's not a conspiracy, it's their business model.
And as they do, as the left likes to say, they say the quiet part out loud.
Just listen to what Tom Perez has said as far as what the Democrat electoral strategy will be moving forward.
So it's uh it continues to be troubling.
He's Peter Schweitzer, I'm Eric Eggers.
We want to leave you with our last segment coming up with maybe something slightly more hopeful than just the depressed state of the economy and American immigration system.
We'll see if we're successful or not.
If you want to give us a call, it's 1-800-941-Shawn.
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And if you like what you hear, you can find our podcast at the drilldown.com.
This is Peter Schweitzer.
I'm with Eric Eggers.
We are filling in for Sean on this wonderful December the 19th.
We're going to go to Jim in Florida.
Jim, how are you?
Hey, good evening, gentlemen.
It's uh it's a pleasure to speak with you.
Thank you.
Let me predicate this real quick in that I'm a driver.
And uh my days are filled with the Patriot channel from Breitbart all the way up through Stacey, while she did in the evening.
So I consider myself uh a pretty political savvy.
Far and above and beyond your average Mountain Cabinet boy.
Um but over the years, what I I with all the guests and things that they've had on that the channels have had on the end, uh the programs have had, you know, it's it's the semantics.
It's like this needs to be done, this should be done.
Well, this needs to be done, it should be done.
And Peter, your work is magical, and you've exposed so much, but yet nothing has been done.
There's really been no change.
It's like there's this apathy across this country now.
It's like a Bruce Hornsby song, and it's just that's the way it is.
And what do you do about it?
Well, look, I I appreciate the sentiments and and the kind words.
What I would say is that there are things that are moving.
We want them to move faster.
Um, in fact, we've got a podcast uh next week uh that you can find on the drilldown.com.
It uh is a podcast where we interview two gentlemen, uh local guys, retired military in the state of Illinois, and over the last ten years, they have been working to clean up the state, and more than five hundred local officials have either gone to jail or have lost their jobs because of the corruption they're engaging in.
So I agree with you.
Washington, D.C. it's hard, but there are things that we can do at the local level and move up to the federal level.
And Jim, we hear that all the time, and that's a very real thing you're expressing.
It's called outrage fatigue and the the media websites that deal with conservative reporting, they see it often.
Um I know Peter Schweitzer likes to refer to what we do at the Government Accountability Institute as Paul Revere, and that's not because he has delusions of patriotic grandeur, but because he thinks it's our job to tell people where the problems are, and then the mechanisms of government who are tasked with identifying them, like congressional committees.
I think now that we have Republicans in charge, you actually have some optimism that we'll see some of the things that you reported on for the last four years actually be investigated, and maybe charges will actually be filed.
Yeah, the wheels of government turn slowly, but they do turn.
And you're right.
We view ourselves as Paul Revere.
Paul Revere could alert people that the British were coming, but it wasn't his job to rally the Continental Congress or the Continental Army uh to fight the British.
And what we're seeing, I think going to see with this new Congress are actual congressional hearings where Hunter Biden is subpoenaed.
It's been four years since we first broke this story with Sean Hannity in 2018, but it's now finally coming to fruition, and that's something we should all be very excited about.
We are excited.
That's Peter Schweitzer.
I'm Eric Eggers.
It's been an honor to talk to you today.
Thank you, Linda.
Thank you, Sean.
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